radiofree.asia

Category: War On Terror

  • Guantanamo Is ​Who and What We Are as Americans



    For over 20 years, every Monday afternoon, I’ve stood with like-minded concerned citizens on Rt. 15 on Deer Isle, Maine—members of our Island Peace & Justice group—standing in objection and in witness to the acts of our government. Each week, I reflect on just why I am there and each week I arrive unavoidably at the conclusion that the U.S. is the scourge of the planet, a rogue nation.

    Below are a very few of those crimes that come to mind, but are so egregious as to haunt me.

    The Vietnam War

    As a Vietnam veteran of the nightmare visited on that country that war is never far from my conscience and, frankly, always soon to return. My reflections, invariably then take me to Agent Orange—arguably the most hideous aspect of that misbegotten war. There remain institutionalized 2 to 3 million 2nd and 3rd generation victims of A.O. unable to take care of themselves.

    I think of the then-secret bombing of Laos and its legacy—thousands upon thousands of bomblets remain buried across the country waiting to take the legs or lives of the innocents wanting only to work or play or simply walk on their lands.

    A world of military bases and outposts

    I think of all the people, around the world, who live close by and who object to our nearly 800 bases on foreign lands. We have over three times the total number of foreign bases owned by all other countries. And I think about the environment under assault around each of those facilities.

    And I think particularly of the people of the Marshall Islands, of Thule, Greenland, and Diego Garcia in the Pacific—all places from which natives were forcibly removed to make way for the U.S. military. I have visited members of each of these communities and heard their wrenching stories—each a nightmare revealing our peculiar capacity for “othering”—a term brought to my attention by the activist, Brian Willson, who lost both his legs while attempting to stop an armaments train taking weaponry to the Nicaraguan Contras. His often-voiced mantra, “We are worth more, they are worth less.” That seems evermore to be apropos of this country.

    Nuclear arsenal and the warships named after War Crimes

    Then of course, there’s the atomic bomb. We remain the only country to ever use atomic weapons on a civilian population. During the Vietnam War the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons on at least 13 occasions. Sounds like rogue behavior to me.

    Now we have learned there will be a christening of another warship, the USS Fallujah, enshrining the battles in the Iraq town of that name. Our legacy there includes a veritable outbreak of babies born with congenital abnormalities attributed to our use of illegal chemical weapons.

    Rogue state on the world stage

    International treaties offer further evidence of rogue-nation behavior—there we stand above, or is it below, all others?

    Of all the member states of the United Nations, 196 are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity while just four members—including the United States—have refused. Among other treaties the U.S. has refused to ratify are the Rome statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines the convention on discrimination against women, the convention on hazardous waste, and the test ban treaty. The only nation on Earth not to ratify the convention on the rights of the child—as well as the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole? Answer: The United States. Right now, there are around 2,500 people serving life for crimes they were involved in years ago as children. What?!

    War on whistleblowers

    And, of course, we well know of the horrific fates of many who have worked to “put the lie” to America’s self-purported exceptionalism—Julien Assange, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and Daniel Hale all come to mind.

    The author George Monbiot characterizes this portrait of our country as manifestation of America’s claim to exceptionalism and as an “active, proud, and furious refusal to care about the lives of others.”

    All of it, all of it, smacks of rogue behavior. Our country does as it damn well pleases; yet we are fed the fiction that we are the exceptional nation. This is not simply a rant. It’s straight-line stuff: all related and all relevant.

    I believe our extraordinary capacity for “othering” and notions of exceptionalism are rooted in our European ancestors believing it was their destiny to rule over indigenous lands. I believe we can draw this straight line from the genocide of the indigenous people of this continent—perhaps as many as 16 million, through the slave trade—a straight line to our contemporary ability to “other” people.

    The shame and symbolism of an offshore prison

    And, I would suggest that Guantanamo stands as symbolic of all of this—who and what we are. The offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay stands on foreign land to which we have no right and are not wanted. I have visited nearby Guantanamo City and have demonstrated there with the local citizens who demand closure of the base.

    Islamophobia clearly explains the reality of Guantanamo prison. The poor souls there are as “other” as other can be. Every man and boy imprisoned there has been a Muslim-or as so frequently characterized, the worst of the worst. Americans are led to believe that being Muslim they are inherently terroristic and irredeemable.

    When we think of the forsaken souls at Guantanamo we know silence is not an option. Guantanamo persists as a symbol. There’s a level of complicity we all share. Biden says he wants to close it. It is incumbent upon every American to hold him to his stated intention.

    You may learn how you can support Guantanamo survivors here.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ’21 Years Is 21 Too Many’: 150+ Groups Urge Biden to Close Guantánamo



    Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to “act without delay” to close the notorious lockup.

    “Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility—built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s—is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” the groups said in a letter to President Joe Biden. “The Guantánamo detention facility was designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and Bush administration officials incubated torture there.”

    Since 2002, 779 men and boys have been held at Guantanamo, many of them tortured, and nearly all without ever being charged or tried. According to retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—who served as chief of staff to Bush-era Secretary of State Colin Powell—Bush, along with his vice president and defense secretary, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, knew that most of the Gitmo prisoners were innocent, but kept them locked up for political reasons.

    Obama—whose vice president was Biden—issued executive orders after entering the White House in 2009 that were meant to end torture and close Gitmo. However, Obama—who was blocked by Congress from implementing the prison’s closure—broke a campaign promise and the law by actively shielding Bush-era officials from accountability while torture continued at Gitmo.

    “Thirty-five remain there today, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world,” the groups’ new letter states. “Guantánamo embodies the fact that the United States government has long viewed communities of color—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a security threat, to devastating consequences.”

    “This is not a problem of the past,” the signers stressed. “Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the aging and increasingly ill men still detained indefinitely there, most without charge and none having received a fair trial. It has also devastated their families and communities. The approach Guantánamo exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations.”

    The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents three of the 21 Guantánamo prisoners who have been cleared for release and which signed the letter, said in a statement:

    We should not be marking another year in the life of this ignominious product of U.S. imperialism and racism as we have every January since the first anniversary of its opening in 2002. Yet we will succeed in shutting it down. Despite the lack of will of presidents who have claimed to support closure and the express desire of some political leaders to keep the prison open forever, the prison population has shrunk by 95% from its peak—the result of pressure from a broad coalition from around the globe, including the imprisoned men themselves, their families, and Guantánamo survivors who have been released.

    Asked shortly after taking office whether the Biden administration will move to close Gitmo, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “that certainly is our goal and our intention.”

    However, the Biden administration has taken few steps toward that goal, while spending millions of dollars on a new secret courtroom at the prison.

    Last year, the administration released four Guantánamo prisoners, including 75-year-old Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, the oldest person ever imprisoned there.

    “It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused,” the groups’ letter argues. “Closing the Guantánamo detention facility, ending indefinite military detention of those held there, and never again using the military base for unlawful mass detention of any group of people are necessary steps towards those ends.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Veterans Understand Martin Luther King Jr’s Powerful Demand for Peace



    Veterans Day celebrations have come and gone. One thing about veterans: Everyone’s for them. But what does that really encompass? How did they get here? And what of the veterans to come?

    The World Veterans Federation (WVF) is an international network comprised of 172 veterans organizations from 121 countries representing about 60 million veterans worldwide. It acts as a humanitarian, peace, and justice advocate not just for veterans but for victims of war. Out of those 121 countries with 60 million veterans, one country contains about 19 million — over 30% — of all the world’s veterans. That’s the United States.

    Why so many? The U.S. represents only 4.25% of the world’s population. That outsize representation, where we dramatically outnumber other countries in producing veterans, is repeated in our jails where we imprison more than 20% of the entire world’s prison population and repeated in our routine gun shootings where we own 42% of the world’s privately held guns.

    Veterans For Peace (a U.S. member of WVF), was formed in 1985. Odds are you’ve never heard of it. It suffers from a lack of recognition, particularly among members of Congress, precisely because it stands in opposition to US wars of aggression (Iraq in 2003 as characterized by Kofi Annan).

    It’s irrational to honor veterans and create them simultaneously. Over 99% of our living veterans have not fought in defensive wars! It matters when veterans are created in wars for an unspecified (or bogus) national interest. This is not a trivial point.

    Foreign policy is a blind spot for Americans. This became part of Martin Luther King’s message. He said if you want to understand what’s taking place in America, look past that to what America is doing overseas. The military violence we sow overseas mirrors the violence of the oppressed here at home.

    King did not merely have a dream on the Washington Mall. If that was all there was to it, he wouldn’t have become an enemy of the state. He audaciously demanded of his country social and economic justice. Without realizing the enormous compliment it was paying Karl Marx and communism, the state regarded him as a communist for demanding such things. Which is the more radical? Asking for this, or denying it.

    It’s over half a century since King’s assassination, martyred at the age of 39. We exploit his memory each year with a national holiday bearing his name, but we have not moved an inch closer to remodeling our country on the world stage to exemplify what it could be like at home.

    Unless we are truly defending our country—and not for the so-called national interest that represents the class interests of the one percent—the best way to honor veterans is not with 10% off and thank you for your service. Peace, not war, is the way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. This is the central theme of Veterans For Peace.

    For possible change, these things must be demanded, but who gets to make demands on Washington? The top one percent own 32.3% of the country’s wealth, against the bottom fifty percent owning a mere 2.6%. Half the country owns practically nothing.

    It takes the totality of the bottom ninety percent, owning 30.2%, to approach the wealth of the one percent. Of course this has no affect on the balance of power. The bottom ninety percent are so divided it’s not funny, and even if they weren’t, they don’t run anything. The well-off section between 91 and 99% doesn’t run anything either. The top 1%—although not necessarily agreeing with one another—run the country.

    As far as the general public is concerned, placing faith in the U.S. Supreme Court is bound to disappoint. For much of its history, it’s been on the wrong side of the people. Whatever else can be said about it, our recent conservative court is being faithful to its roots. For example, the Citizens United ruling enables the 1% (corporations , plutocrats, and Wall Street) to spend unlimited funds on elections. There’s a straight line from this to the founding fathers’ enshrinement of property rights (land, capital, patriarchy, slaves) in our Constitution. That’s what they wanted.

    John Jay—founding father, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and first U.S. Chief Justice—expressed the principle very clearly: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” For all the lip service about democracy, that’s the way it was designed, and that’s the way it’s been.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?



    When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

    It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

    Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

    Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

    Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

    Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

    The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

    In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

    Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

    In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

    The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

    Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

    On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

    Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

    That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

    Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

    The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

    France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

    Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

    Scholz was even more specific. In an article in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

    This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

    Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

    Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

    Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

    Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

    A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

    Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

    U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

    Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

    Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • House Passes $858 Billion Military Spending Bill

    Peace advocates on Thursday slammed the House of Representatives’ passage of a mammoth $858 billion military spending bill as an early holiday gift for the Pentagon and the weapons corporations who benefit from the United States’ ongoing — but largely forgotten — War on Terror. House lawmakers voted 350-80 in favor of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with 45 Democrats and 35…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Purdue Students and Faculty Say No to War Criminals on Campus

    On December 6, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels and former U.S. President George W. Bush will appear together on a Purdue stage at an event billed by the university as a conversation on “leadership and citizenship.” Daniels is completing a nearly 10-year term as Purdue president. Previously, Daniels served from 2001-2003 as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush White House. The event is meant to celebrate both of their legacies.

    Plans are underway for Daniels and Bush to be greeted that night by Purdue students, faculty and community members there for a different reason: to protest Bush and Daniels’s roles in the murderous U.S. war against the people of Iraq in the name of the “war on terror.”

    As president, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, supposedly in retaliation for 9/11. As his budget director, Daniels priced the war for him at $50-60 billion. The subsequent U.S. onslaught produced devastation for the Iraqi people. More than 200,000 civilians died and more than 9.2 million Iraqis were displaced by the U.S. war. Kali Rubaii, a Purdue professor of anthropology, has documented high rates of birth defects in Iraq that may be the result of uranium and heavy metal exposure from U.S. weapons and burn pits meant to destroy the detritus of war. At least 800,000 Iraqi children were made orphans by the war. And despite Daniels’s original low projections, the U.S. has now spent approximately $2 trillion to date on the Iraq war, while more than 4,500 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives fighting it. All of this carnage against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Even U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious allegations of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” were later admitted by Powell himself to have been the result of deceitful intelligence.

    The Bush-Daniels summit meeting at a public university seeking to glorify and whitewash Iraq’s apocalypse might be seen as a parable for the rise of what Henry A. Giroux has called the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (MIAC). In his 2007 book, The University in Chains, Giroux documented how since the Cold War the U.S. academy had been a recurring site for research, investment and collaboration with the U.S. military-state in proliferating war and war profiteering across the planet. This trend was massively jumpstarted by 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security, created by the Bush administration, distributed billions of dollars to universities to support national security research and programming.

    In January 2006, at the University Presidents Summit, then-President Bush announced the “National Security Language Initiative,” funneling millions of dollars from the Departments of State, Education and Defense to promote the study of Arabic as a part of the state’s Islamophobic security apparatus. In 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates launched the “Minerva Research Initiative,” providing university grants for social science research that focuses “on areas of strategic importance to the U.S. national security policy.” To date, the initiative has funded hundreds of university faculty projects intended to improve “our basic understanding of security.” Funded faculty projects include “Combatting Chinese Influence in Contested and Non-Contested Territories” and “Foreign Military Training: Building Effective Armed Forces in Weak States.”

    For Giroux, the MIAC’s function has been not only to support the advent and advance of U.S. wars, but to link the privatization of public education to the eradication of critical thinking about the contours of U.S. political and economic empire. Indeed, Daniels’s reign at Purdue is a continuation of the university’s own long promotion of academic militarization. In 2002, it opened the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, one of the first in the United States. The institute partners with U.S. military branches, the Department of Homeland Security, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and Indiana State Police to conduct research into topics like “active shooter” situations. It also offers no-cost graduate education to active-duty military officers.

    Since Daniels’s arrival as president in 2013, the university has further muscled up its military bona fides. In 2019, the Swedish manufacturer Saab announced it would build the airframe for the T-7A Redhawk fighter jet at Purdue’s Discovery Research Park to help train the “next generation of fighter and bomber pilots.” Daniels extolled the collaboration as a chance for Purdue to lead in “protecting the security of Americans.” In February 2021, Purdue received Department of Defense funding to participate in a consortial research project into advancing the adoption of lead-free electronics in defense systems. More recently, in August 2022, Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks was given a tour of the campus’s research and development facilities, including its nanotechnology. “We are investing heavily in the infrastructure, human and physical, to design, test and develop the systems necessary to protect the freedoms Americans enjoy,” said Daniels of the visit.

    Daniels’s enthusiasm for war-making in the name of empire is a grisly but logical evolution of his role preparing the budget for a national war his then-boss President Bush described as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But as Giroux has argued, the militarization of the American state and the militarization of the American university are symptomatic of other forms of racial, political and economic violence at work in the U.S.

    Daniels, for example, earned himself the nickname “The Blade” while working as White House budget director for his alleged budget-balancing feats and commitment to austerity. Yet many students at Purdue, especially students of color, will tell you that Daniels’s weaponized nickname cuts in more than one way.

    For example, in November 2019, Daniels drew national fire for telling a group of Black students that the university was recruiting “one of the rarest creatures in America,” a leading Black scholar. Daniels later apologized for the comment, but it reminded many students that the university leader had been conspicuously unsupportive when openly white supremacist posters were found tacked up on the university campus in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. Daniels first said of the posters it was “not at all clear what they mean” despite their use of classic Nazi imagery. Demanding a stronger condemnation of the posters, students occupied the university administration building. When the president refused to meet with them, they remained in the building throughout the spring term.

    Student vulnerabilities reflected the general rise of racist militarization on college campuses in the U.S., such as the white nationalists who began their murderous feats at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 with a torch-lit march across the University of Virginia campus. Trump as a presidential candidate frequently invoked 9/11, then enacted a Muslim ban once elected. International student applications to the U.S. dropped accordingly.

    Trump’s Department of Education sustained the Islamophobic project of 9/11 by demanding that the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES) revise its curriculum or risk losing federal funding. A letter sent from the Education Department read, “It seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.” The letter also said that the CMES was inappropriately promoting the “positive aspects of Islam.”

    Organizers at Purdue are using this poster (and its QR code) to spread awareness of the protest planned for December 6.
    Organizers at Purdue are using this poster (and its QR code) to spread awareness of the protest planned for December 6.

    Episodes like these are reminders that the MIAC is both a structural and lived experience, especially for non-white and non-Christian denizens of U.S. universities, and that a true legacy of the war on terror within the United States has been an increasing atmosphere of racial policing, surveillance and academic militarization. Indeed, rhetoric of academic diversity and liberal multiculturalism on university campuses now easily coexists with rising militarism. When Purdue and Saab announced their partnership to build fighter planes, both highlighted that the “Red Tail” design on the aircraft was an ode to the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators in the U.S. Air Force Army Corps in World War II. The use of racial diversity to promote U.S. warfare is a mask for the human costs of war — for both its victims and those who fight it.

    More senior students on campus worry too that Bush’s role in the war on terror and the war on Iraq itself have been erased from historical memory for the current generation. Paige Frazier, a Ph.D. student in Purdue’s American Studies Program who plans to protest, said:

    Many in Purdue’s undergraduate class are too young to remember Bush as a war criminal. George Bush lied to the American people, spent trillions of tax dollars on an unjust war, and caused immeasurable pain and suffering in Iraq and here at home. It is appalling that Mitch Daniels and other Purdue leaders believe that George W. Bush’s presence on campus will be somehow beneficial for our student body.

    In the meantime, the MIAC has become big business. U.S. News and World Report now lists and ranks “Homeland Security Programs” across U.S. universities while the Office of Homeland Security boasts an Office of University Programs which “harnesses the intellectual power of America’s universities to provide innovative research, development, and education to the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE).” College Factual meanwhile estimates that at least 7,000 degrees in Homeland Security were granted in the academic year 2021-2022, with an average starting salary of $52,000. Purdue Global University meanwhile offers an “Online Master’s Degree in Homeland Security and Emergency Management.” Purdue Global is itself a new Frankensteinian entry into the MIAC, a public online university built from Purdue’s 2018 purchase — for one dollar — of the for-profit online Kaplan University. Purdue Global is operated by the Purdue Board of Trustees and described as a “public benefit corporation.” It expands the MIAC footprint into a global market of thousands of virtual degree consumers both inside and outside of the U.S.

    It is these sprawling conditions spawned by and through the war on terror — and its bedfellow Military-Industrial-Academic Complex — that activists, organizers and people of conscience will be protesting as George W. Bush and Mitch Daniels take the stage at Purdue. One faculty member joining the protest who requested anonymity for fear of retribution said of the event:

    It is inappropriate for a man who deceived the American public to launch an illegal invasion, ignored the mass protests of his own citizens and sent thousands of Iraqis and Americans to their deaths, to be speaking at a public university that prides itself on integrity. We take this as an opportunity to do a teach-in to educate ourselves about the history and costs of militarism in our lives.

    And said one local Democratic Socialists of America organizer who plans to protest:

    George W. Bush and his administration represent corruption, lawlessness and militarism. This legacy is the complete opposite of the things a university should dedicate itself to. We hope that all members of the community will turn out to demonstrate their opposition to this ill-conceived invitation.

    The organizers and activists will hold a teach-in and speak-out on December 6 as part of their protest. Their organizing efforts include this petition to protest Bush’s appearance and circulating the scannable QR code on the poster accompanying this story. The protesters’ rally will be in solidarity with other national movements to demilitarize university campuses, like the national Cops Off Campus Coalition and Dissenters, a group committed to reclaiming resources from the war industry. These movements align with ongoing battles to demilitarize K-12 education as documented in Scott Harding and Seth Kershner’s 2015 book, Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools. The protest efforts also fall under the broad banner of the contemporary abolitionist movement, which seeks restorative justice and a redistribution of public goods from death-making institutions like war and prisons to life-making activities like schools. Those protesting the Bush-Daniels summit will thus be fighting both in memory of those martyred by the U.S. war against Iraq and for a world that includes the right to live and build alternatives to state violence, racism and empire.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dutch court rules 2007 Afghan air strike ‘unlawful’

    A deadly Dutch air strike on a civilian compound in Afghanistan in 2007 was unlawful, a court in the Netherlands ruled on Wednesday 23 November, ordering the country to compensate the victims’ families.

    Four Afghans, who were not named in the court papers, took the Dutch state to court over the incident, which occurred during fighting between international forces and the Taliban in Uruzgan province in central Afghanistan.
    In the early hours of June 17, 2007, Dutch F-16 fighter jets dropped 28 guided bombs in the area. Of these, 18 landed on walled compounds – called “qalas” – near the strategic town of Chora.Several bombs landed on one of the compounds, designated “qala 4131”. They killed at least 18 of the claimants’ relatives, court papers said.

    Verdict

    Dutch forces had not properly distinguished between military and civilian targets, the court ruled. It said:

    The court concludes that the State has not sufficiently substantiated that at the time… there was sufficient information in which a reasonable commander could designate it as a military target.

    The victims included the wife, two daughters, three sons and a daughter-in-law of one of the claimants.

    Dutch government lawyers claimed the Taliban used the compound for military purposes and although civilians lived there, the attack was indeed justified. However, judges said there had been no firing around the stricken compound for at least 15 hours before the bombing.

    The claimants’ lawyer, Liesbeth Zegveld, told Agence France-Presse (AFP):

    The most recent information was already 15 hours old.

    The intelligence is not of a nature in which one could say, ‘Well, yes please, go ahead with seven bombs.

    Judges also ruled that the victims should be compensated, but that exact amounts would be determined at a later stage.

    Further inquiries

    The ruling comes as Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues its campaign for an inquiry into potential human rights violations “by all sides” in Afghanistan. HRW have said:

    Human Rights Watch research found numerous violations of international humanitarian law by Afghan government forces, and has documented torture and ill-treatment of detainees by the United States military and CIA since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

    While the latest ruling about the unlawful Dutch air strike in Afghanistan will be welcome, HRW warn that the road ahead for accountability will be difficult:

    A fraught security environment, in which the Taliban frequently threaten and intimidate people who speak against them, and a difficult political landscape for justice in Afghanistan highlight both the need for an ICC investigation and the problems the court may face in gathering evidence.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The War on Terror’s Detention and Torture Practices Have Not Gone Away

    The so-called “war on terror,” initiated by the U.S. and its global allies in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, did not so much change the rules of warfare as throw them out of the window.

    In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war was virtually abandoned when the U.S. and its allies detained hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, mainly civilians. The use of torture and indefinite arbitrary detention became defining features of the war on terror.

    Intelligence yielded from the use of torture was not particularly effective, and experimentation on human subjects was an element of the process. Guantánamo Bay, which currently holds 36 prisoners, is viewed by many human rights defenders as a final remnant of the policy of mass arbitrary detention.

    The little light shed on these practices has largely been the result of hard and persistent work by international and civil society organizations, as well as lawyers who continue to sue states and other parties involved on behalf of victims and their families, some of whom are still detained.

    A report presented earlier this year by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, following up on a 2010 U.N. report on secret detention, found that the “failure to address secret detention” has allowed similar practices to flourish in North-East Syria and Xinjiang Province in China.

    North-East Syria

    How to deal with arbitrarily detained alleged ISIS (also known as Daesh) militia supporters and fighters in Syria and Iraq is an issue that goes back to the Obama era, but gained traction in 2018-2019, when ISIS lost its last major stronghold and significant territory, leading existing detention camps, like Al-Hawl, to swell in size. Al-Hawl was set up as an Iraqi refugee camp by the U.N. in 1991 with capacity for around 15,000 people. In 2018, it held around 10,000 Iraqi refugees. The majority of the 73,000-plus residents of this camp since 2019 are women and children, around 11,000 of whom are nationals of countries other than Syria or Iraq, living in poor shelter, hygiene and medical conditions.

    All are detained by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the Syrian Defense Force (SDF), which are not state entities. Their efforts to investigate and prosecute possible ISIS fighters are still at the early stages, lack formal and widespread recognition and do not look at potential war crimes. With some prisoners detained for over six years, without charge, trial or formal identification, the situation is pretty much as it was in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    According to Ní Aoláin, “No legal process of any kind has been established to justify the detention of these individuals. No public information exists on who precisely is being held in these camps, contrary to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions stipulating that detention records be kept that identify both the nationality of detainees and the legal basis of detention.”

    She further states that, “These camps epitomize the normalization and expansion of secret detention practices in the two decades since the establishment of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The egregious nature of secret, incommunicado, harsh, degrading and unacceptable detention is now practised with impunity and the acquiescence of multiple States.”

    In addition, around 10,000 men and 750 boys (of whom 2,000 and 150 are respectively not from Syria or Iraq) are held in some 14 detention centers in North-East Syria, accused of association with ISIS: “No judicial process has determined the legality or appropriateness of their detention. There are also reports of incommunicado detention.”

    Efforts have been made, with varying success, to repatriate and release Iraqi refugees and Syrians internally displaced by the regional conflict: Around 2400 Iraqis have been repatriated over the past year or so.

    European and other Western states were initially reluctant to repatriate their nationals — with former President Trump threatening to force them to — and some, such as the U.K., introducing measures to strip them of citizenship to prevent that. More recent efforts by European states have taken on a gendered approach, aimed at repatriating women and children in the camps. This approach, however, ignores the practice of the SDF to separate boys as young as 9 from their families and detain them, as a security risk, with men in prisons. Concern was only expressed during a prison break in early 2022 when it was feared these children would fall into ISIS’s hands, as though they were somehow safe with their original captors.

    Missing the Point

    The gendered approach to repatriation of detainees plays into long-standing orientalist and imperialist views, framing Western powers as saviors of these women and children, whereas the men and boys left behind remain “ISIS fighters” without investigation and substantiation of this status.

    In spite of the recent U.S. conviction of two former British ISIS fighters for their role in the kidnapping and deaths of Western hostages, the value of such a detention policy must be questioned. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, arbitrary detention and cruel punishment of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes in conditions worse than those they are associated with, is unjustifiable.

    Ní Aoláin’s report also found that no war on terror detainees have “received a complete and adequate legal remedy,” and the lack of due process has resulted in the continuing stigmatization and persecution of prisoners upon release from Guantánamo.

    Two decades on, the absence of justice at Guantánamo remains a recurring theme. Prosecutors are now seeking a plea deal settlement with defense lawyers in the 9/11 case that would avoid trial — and thus torture revelations — and the death penalty, as the case continues to drag over a decade on.

    The farce of “justice” is also amply demonstrated by the failure to release Majid Khan, who, following a plea bargain and several years of torture in secret CIA prisons, completed his sentence on March 1; the military jurors at his sentencing hearing decried the torture he faced and petitioned for clemency for him. However, he remains at Guantánamo as it is too unsafe for him to return to Pakistan and the U.S. has found no safe country for relocation. After being sued to take action, the U.S. Department of Justice has responded by opposing his habeas plea and claiming that he is still not subject to the Geneva Conventions.

    What Justice?

    The outcome of two decades of secret and arbitrary detention has been to deny justice to the victims of war crimes and terrorist acts, and create new victims — detainees and their families — who are also denied justice.

    After two decades, the failure to close Guantánamo and end such secret and arbitrary detention and the secrecy that continues to surround them (such as the refusal to disclose the full 2014 Senate CIA torture report) are not errors or oversight but deliberate policy. It affords impunity for states and state-backed actors while tarring detainees with the “terrorist” label for the rest of their lives without due process, effectively leaving them in permanent legal limbo in many areas of everyday life.

    A year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, justice still evades the Afghan people. With the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking to restart its investigation, but excluding the U.S. and its Afghan allies from its scope, effectively granting them impunity while focusing on the Taliban, “the ICC has so far come to represent selective and delayed justice to many victims of war in Afghanistan,” according to Shaharzad Akbar, former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. In addition, “a year after the withdrawal of international forces and many ‘lessons learned’ exercises, key troop contributing countries such as the United States, the U.K., and others in NATO are yet to reflect on the legacy of impunity they left behind.”

    Not Going Anywhere

    Addressing her report to the U.N. in April, Ní Aoláin stated, “It is precisely the lack of access, transparency, accountability and remedy that has enabled and sustained a permissive environment for contemporary large-scale detention and harm to individuals.”

    Ní Aoláin expresses concerns in her report over the “lack of a globally agreed definition of terrorism and (violent) extremism, and […] the widespread failure to define acts of terrorism in concrete and precise ways in national legislation.” The vague definition has meant that any form of dissent and resistance against the state can effectively be labelled terrorist activity.

    The focus on Guantánamo and mass detention of alleged terrorism suspects has drawn the attention away from the carceral practices of states. Torture, lengthy solitary confinement, rape, and other prisoner abuses in federal jails has not prompted the same criticism or action. The focus on ISIS prisoners also draws away attention from the mass detention and abuse of those incarcerated in Syrian prisons.

    At the same time, mass arbitrary and secret detention of alleged terrorists has helped to justify the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, with the involvement of private contractors. Over the past two decades, the use of torture has grown worldwide. Perhaps most worrying has been the boom in the mass arbitrary detention and abuse of men, women and children worldwide without due process and few legal rights known as immigration detention, with the reframing of migration and asylum as a security issue over the past two decades.

    That such reports and monitoring of the situation continue at the highest level and by civil society organizations means that the prisoners have not been obscured and forgotten or their situation normalized as much as the states involved would like them to be. The need for justice for all victims is on the path to any kind of peace, and thus it remains essential to keep pressing and supporting Ní Aoláin’s call for “access, transparency, accountability and remedy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • African People Bear the Weight of US’s Deadly “War on Terror” on the Continent

    On the evening of September 20, 2001, then-President George W. Bush addressed the American public and laid the political, military and ideological groundwork for the “war on terror,” a global campaign of allied security forces to end domestic and international terrorism, a term so loosely defined that it soon became a container for anyone from al-Qaeda militants to teenage school shooters to January 6 rioters to leftists and human rights activists. In the same way that the world eventually realized the catastrophic failure of the “war on drugs,” more and more people are realizing that the war on terror is also an unwinnable war against a constantly shifting enemy.

    In this address, Bush promised what followed would not be an age of terror, but “an age of liberty, here and across the world.” Twenty-one years after September 11, this “age of liberty” has ushered in an expanded surveillance apparatus, bloated defense budgets, military invasions and occupations, and the death and displacement of millions of people from Iraq to Somalia. While the Middle East is seen as the locus of the war on terror, one of the most ruthlessly pummeled frontiers of this war is the African continent.

    In 2007, in a post-9/11 political and psychological landscape, President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, launched U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all Department of Defense military operations on the continent in order to “monitor and disrupt violent extremist organizations and protect U.S. interests” because of the continent’s growing strategic importance. Initially based in Stuttgart, Germany, AFRICOM was formed without the input or support of any African leaders, many of whom decried its formation and described it as an attempt to establish more U.S. military bases on the continent. In response, U.S. officials said AFRICOM was meant to provide humanitarian assistance and support peace and stability because “a safe, stable, and prosperous Africa is an enduring American interest.” But critics pointed out that Iraq and Afghanistan, twin targets of the war on terror, serve as clear examples of the disastrous consequences of the U.S.’s militarized “humanitarian” efforts.

    AFRICOM has not created the “safety and stability” invoked by U.S. leaders, but it has expanded the U.S. military’s footprint. During the Obama administration, AFRICOM quickly expanded its reach and influence on the continent through military-to-military trainings, joint counterterrorism operations, foreign aid, and other surreptitious methods that created dependence on AFRICOM for the defense needs of African states. Despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war with any African country, there are 46 U.S. military bases and outposts spanning the continent, with the greatest concentration in the Horn of Africa. Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. base in Djibouti, a small East African nation with a poverty rate of 79 percent, serves as the current home to AFRICOM in the Horn. In 2014 the U.S. government secured a 20-year lease for $63,000,000 a year.

    As AFRICOM’s presence across the continent grows, so does the terrorism it is meant to curb. The 2006 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia paved the way for a more militant group, al-Shabab, to grow in rank and reach. This is just one example of how power vacuums caused by U.S. military intervention fortify the political will and strength of terrorist groups.

    In October 2017, in the one of the deadliest terror attacks in Somalia’s history, a truck bombing in Mogadishu killed over 500 civilians, injuring several hundred more. In August 2022, a deadly siege and 30-hour standoff between al-Shabab militants and the Somali security forces at Hotel Hayat in the city center left dozens dead. These attacks point to the country’s fragile security apparatus despite persistent counterterrorism offensives and $243,309,000 in security assistance from the United States in 2022 alone. The U.S.’s decades-long presence has not led to a decrease in terrorist activity but has only caused increased instability in the region and enabled such violence to flourish.

    A 2019 report released by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found terrorist activity doubled from 2012 to 2018, and the number of countries experiencing attacks increased by 960 percent during that time period. Moreover, there was a ten-fold increase in violent events, jumping from 288 incidents in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018. From Boko Haram’s growth in Nigeria, to al-Shabab’s territorial advancements across Somalia, to Daesh’s reappearance in Libya, by all metrics, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure in Africa. The African people, caught in the nexus of the catastrophic violence of terrorism and ensuing counterterrorism efforts, bear the weight of this failed war.

    While AFRICOM training has not helped African security forces curb terrorism, it has enabled them to repress civilian protests against reactionary African leaders who align with U.S. interests, as evidenced by the crackdown on #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria in 2020. SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious western-trained unit of the Nigerian Police, has a documented history of human rights abuses. The war on terror not only created the conditions that enabled the U.S. and its allies unfettered collaboration on security and surveillance through shared counterinsurgency tactics, but the development of a shared language and logic. From Lagos to Minneapolis, the designation of terrorist is frequently deployed against individuals or group that challenge the U.S. imperial project or any of its puppet regimes. President Joe Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is a domestic example of how the state has used the war on terror to criminalize and prosecute protesters and activists.

    The one thing AFRICOM has dramatically succeeded at is boosting corporate profits associated with the lucrative counterterrorism industry that the war on terror has made possible. A 2021 report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project revealed that one-third to one-half of all Pentagon contracts since 9/11 have gone to five transnational weapons corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. From 2001 to 2020, these five companies earned $2.1 trillion from Pentagon contracts. Terrorism is a manufactured political crisis. Unsurprisingly, it is global weapons manufacturers that are tasked with selling the solution.

    On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush lauded the courage and resilience of the American people and said if they ever needed hope or inspiration in the aftermath of the attack, they should “look to the skies” for a reminder of all they have overcome. Meanwhile, a year before Bush delivered this speech at the Flight 93 memorial service, thousands of miles away in southern Somalia, on a clear and sunny day, the air hummed with the sound of U.S. drones flying overhead. A man named Kusow Omar Abukar was eating dinner with his family when they were attacked from the sky. His daughter, Nurto, died. His family’s life was changed forever. The U.S. military claimed there were no civilian causalities and called the strike a success. But even as the U.S. public is encouraged to find comfort and salvation in the heavens, the children of the world live in fear of what the U.S. might unleash from up above. “I no longer love blue skies,” 13-year-old Zubair of North Waziristan told Congress in 2012. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”

    In his first address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, a solemn Bush asked the American people to pray “for all those who grieve, for those children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened.”

    Twenty years later, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, Kusow Abukar looked to the sky and made a different kind of prayer: “Only God can stop America,” he said. “We have no other powers but prayers.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Should Grant Clemency to Drone Warfare Whistleblower Daniel Hale

    One year ago this July, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stood in front of Judge Liam O’Grady at his sentencing and explained himself. After a lengthy investigation and prosecution, it was finally the day when Hale would find out if he would spend years in prison for doing something he felt morally obligated to do: Tell the truth about the United States’ drone program.

    While working as a drone analyst in the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan, he witnessed attacks waged against innocent civilians that, to this day, still haunt him. Those experiences eventually led him to blow the whistle on the drone program. Judge O’Grady said Hale wasn’t being punished for telling the truth, but for stealing government documents that disclose that truth. For that, Hale was subjected to a lengthy investigation and prosecution where he was charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was passed over 100 years ago to deal with spies but has been used to prosecute antiwar dissidents and whistleblowers.

    But Daniel Hale is no spy. He is a person who could not live with himself if he did not tell the U.S. people what was being done in their name. Thanks to him, we had proof that the drone program wasn’t as targeted as we were being told. The prosecution accused Hale of leaking the information that was included in “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept. They included Pentagon documents that confirmed that in one drone operation in Afghanistan, 90 percent of the people killed were not the intended target.

    Hale said to Judge O’Grady:

    I am here today to answer for the crime of stealing papers, for which I expect to spend some portion of my life in prison. But what I am really here for is having stolen something that was never mine to take: precious human life, for which I was well-compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended things weren’t happening that were.… Please, I beg you, forgive me, your honor, for taking papers as opposed to the lives of others. I could not, God so help me, have done otherwise.

    That day, Hale was facing 10 years in prison. His friends and family sat in the courtroom holding their breath, waiting to hear how long it would be until they would see him again. Judge O’Grady handed down a sentence of 45 months. Days later, Hale was moved from Alexandria, Virginia, to Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, where he would spend his 33rd birthday. A year later, he is spending the rest of his sentence in the federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

    A particular story was talked about often in the lead up to Hale’s sentencing. When he was in Afghanistan, he saw the U.S. carry out a drone strike on a car that was allegedly being driven by a target. The missile hit the back of the vehicle, and later Hale saw a woman get out of the passenger side and pull two things out of the car before they drove off again. He found out later that the woman had pulled her daughters out of the car. They had been hit by the drone strike. They were 5 and 3 years old.

    Had the strike gone as planned and the target been killed, his wife and children would be considered “collateral damage.” In this case, the “target” drove off while leaving two little girls behind. The ongoing 20-year-long “war on terror” made collateral damage feel so normal to so many back in the U.S. Hale is in prison for showing the world that these stories are not few and far between, but instead are a regular feature of U.S. drone warfare.

    Over years of investigation and prosecution, the U.S. government was never able to prove Hale’s leaks ever harmed anyone: He is not truly in prison for espionage, but for embarrassing the U.S. government for its undemocratic and brutal practices.

    On a few occasions since the sentencing, I have opened up my mailbox in Chicago to letters from the U.S. federal prison in Marion, Illinois, just a few hours south of me — letters from Daniel Hale. I also talk to his friends about what we’ve heard from him to try and piece together what his life may look like. Every conversation begins with: “How is Daniel doing and is he feeling okay? Who has gone to see him in visitation? Who has he written to?” In Marion, Hale is held in a Communications Management Unit that was first designed to deal with people suspected of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

    Communications are heavily monitored. It took Hale six months to get approval to write to me. While no prison sentence would be justifiable, the fact that he is incarcerated in a unit that effectively limits his interaction with the outside world can only be described as cruel and unusual. Hale is a highly sociable person who had plans to write about his experiences and continue deepening relationships with like-minded people. It is near impossible for him to do so in a unit known as “Little Guantánamo.”

    The Drone Papers containing the information that Hale leaked were released during the Barack Obama presidency, and no one came for him. It wasn’t until the beginning of Donald Trump’s assault on whistleblowers that Hale started to face the consequences for his honesty, and what he felt was his duty to humanity. President Joe Biden has an opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump by granting Hale clemency. His revelations harmed no one, and instead helped scores of U.S. Muslims get removed from undemocratic and illegal terrorist watchlists by giving the Council on American Islamic Relations the information that they needed to sue the U.S. government. Any president who values democracy should see that Hale poses no threat to society and grant his release immediately.

    Hale is a powerful writer, and there is a lot to take from his letter to Judge O’Grady and his sentencing statement. However, he hates when his story takes center stage. He blew the whistle on the drone program not because he wanted to go through years of an espionage investigation and spend years of his life behind bars. He did it because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t tell the world the truth.

    In October 2012, a young boy named Zubair was injured along with his sister in a drone attack in Pakistan. Zubair went in front of Congress and said, “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” That has been the reality of the U.S. drone program. That grief has our country’s name written all over it, and it’s up to us to dramatically change that legacy and free the people who dared to tell us the truth at great personal risk.

  • Allegations that elite UK troops slaughtered innocents fit an international pattern

    Elite soldiers, cover-ups, night-time house raids, and evidence of execution-style killings. The story of Britain’s recent wars will be told for many years to come. And, the latest allegations of war crimes suggest that it will not be a tale of military glory.

    Military personnel from the US, Australia, and the UK are held in high regard, often hero-worshipped by the public and politicians alike. However, their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has led to accusations of criminal activity – including the murder of civilians – as well as seemingly endless allegations of further wrong-doing which have proven difficult to pin down.

    The SAS

    The newest allegations concern operations in Afghanistan over a decade ago. The BBC published their findings on Tuesday 12 July. Through whistleblowers, experts, and witnesses, they found that multiple war crimes had been carried out by an SAS unit in 2011.

    This includes the allegation that innocent civilians were executed during house raids in Helmand Province. Furthermore, senior military officers may have covered up evidence and worked against military police investigators. General Mark Carleton-Smith, a former head of special forces, and later head of the army, was also criticised in the report.

    In one operational tour, it was alleged, up to 54 civilians may have been murdered. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) rejects the claims, calling them “subjective” and “unjustified”.

    Disbanded?

    The responses to the latest in a long line of allegations have been polarised. Some have said the regiment should be disbanded if the claims are true. Others have framed the allegations as improbable. In Parliament, Boris Johnson extended the tradition of never commenting on special forces matters when asked if there would be an investigation. Also in the Commons, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for special forces to be made democratically accountable:

    Some criticised the use of footage from an execution-style killing by Australian SAS soldiers in the BBC film. Like the British military, the Australian military have repeatedly been accused of war crimes in Afghanistan – the problem extends throughout Anglophone Western armies.

    War crimes

    In 2020, the Australian SAS was subject to war crimes allegations. These included the video, mentioned above, of a soldier executing a prisoner at point-blank range.

    Investigators reported that a culture of violent impunity has developed in the elite unit. One described the soldiers conduct as:

    deliberate, repeated and targeted war crimes.

    Other allegations included a practice called ‘blooding’, in which new SAS soldiers were made to murder prisoners in order to acquire their first kill.

    A report noted that the unit’s ‘distorted’ culture:

    …was embraced and amplified by some experienced, charismatic and influential non-commissioned officers and their proteges, who sought to fuse military excellence with ego, elitism and entitlement.

    Seal Team 6

    For their part, elite US forces have been subject to similar allegations, including unlawful killings and the mutilation of bodies. In the latter case, this included the use of specially made hatchets modelled after indigenous American tomahawks.

    Like the Australians, reports suggest that a toxic unit culture developed in the SEALS, a US Navy special forces unit. They reportedly treated killing like a sport, fetishising particular kinds of headshot:

    “There is and was no military reason whatsoever to split someone’s skull open with a single round,” said a former SEAL Team 6 leader. “It’s sport.”

    One of the highest-profile cases was of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of various crimes but eventually acquitted. Among those to rally to his cause was Donald Trump. In other cases, Trump pardoned elite soldiers accused of wartime atrocities.

    Overseas Operation Bill

    Responses from the state have varied across the US, UK, and Australia. In Australia, an investigation was launched. In the US, war crimes became a partisan issue, with Trump intervening in favour of soldiers. In the UK, the process culminated in the Overseas Operations Bill. This has since become law.

    The bill, which was heavily criticised by veterans, military charities, lawyers, and human rights groups, has made it harder to investigate and prosecute war criminals. It includes what is in effect a five-year run-out date for allegations to be brought. Keir Starmer’s Labour was whipped to abstain from the bill, and the few who voted against it were disciplined.

    Immunity from justice

    The “war on terror” has seen armed forces personnel, and particularly elite military units, elevated to the status of heroes. Beneath that façade, there have been numerous accusations of brutality and murder. Special forces units from across the Western world often appear to have evolved toxic leadership cultures and enjoy little accountability.

    In cases where they have been accused – or even found guilty of crimes – they have usually been framed as victims. The truth is, the victims have always been the often-nameless, forgotten, occupied people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And without a serious reckoning with these allegations, similar atrocities will happen again and again.

    Featured image via Elite Forces UK, cropped to 770 x 403.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Twenty Years Later, It Is Still Time to Dismantle the War on Terror

    Three days after the twin towers fell, then-President George W. Bush called for Americans to “unite.” What followed was the decades-long United States military-led campaign — the “war on terror” — which has resulted in the death of over 2 million Muslims; the expansion of a network of over 800 global U.S. military bases; and the creation of codified Islamophobia, the violence of which knows no bounds. The rhetoric framing and otherizing of Muslims as people inherently prone to terrorism has been embedded in the design of post-9/11 policies “overtly and covertly, domestic and external,” Maha Hilal recounts in her new book, Innocent Until Proven Muslim.

    From the get-go, the Bush administration swiftly deployed a version of public morality upholding dichotomous ideological values between the West and Islam — painting any response by the U.S. as “acceptable and even necessary.” As reported in the book, the five dimensions of the war on terror are: militarism and warfare, draconian immigration policy, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture.

    The root of the war on terror — institutionalized Islamophobia laced with white supremacy — has allowed the U.S. government to carry out state-sanctioned violence without an ounce of accountability. Two decades later, Muslims abroad and in the U.S. are facing the repercussions of a plethora of xenophobic programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration system, the use of Guantánamo Bay prison to house and torture Muslim men, and surveillance initiatives like Countering Violent Extremism. Muslims in the U.S. are forced to reconcile with their identities, whether they’re making a trip to the mosque for Jummah prayer or calling out the U.S. government for the destruction of their homelands.

    Innocent Until Proven Muslim is an accumulation of Hilal’s ongoing research and efforts to organize to dismantle the war on terror by highlighting the most devastating impacts of U.S. empire. Analyzing everything from the panoptic violence of surveillance to the ongoing violations of fundamental rights, Hilal envisions a world in which Muslims no longer live under a cloud of suspicion.

    Three Presidents Built, Maintained and Expanded the War on Terror

    The U.S.’s narrow framing of moral culpability under the guise of national security has persisted under three successive presidencies, broadening the scope of state violence at every turn. Hilal describes the extent to which Muslim lives have been dehumanized.

    Consider the pattern of performative accountability: Americans were shocked when photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal emerged, documenting extensive torture of Muslim prisoners who were punched, slapped, kicked, doused with hot water, forced into stress positions for hours, threatened with dogs, etc. In response, former President Bush stated, “The prison does not represent the America that I know,” evading any critique of the government while intentionally disregarding the livelihood of the Iraqis who were tortured.

    Hilal writes, “The extent to which this has been allowed is a testament to the power of narrative to create real-world systems and the resilience that same narrative power displays to evade responsibility for the human cost of the systems it supports.”

    During Barack Obama’s administration, a U.S. soldier massacred 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The immediate administrative focus, as Obama put it, was the “sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan” — sacrifices for whom? These examples illustrate how both Bush and Obama were experts at erasing the victimization of Muslims to justify the war on terror by any means. An entire infrastructure of systematic Islamophobia was designed in the early days after 9/11, and these attitudes toward counterterrorism have since been codified in law and policy. The true reach of the war on terror is difficult to imagine.

    Openly glorifying in brutality, former President Donald Trump has expressed pride in state violence carried out during his presidency and laid the groundwork to leverage support for extreme policies like the Muslim ban. In 2015, Trump said the U.S. needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the U.S. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.

    Trump’s efforts to further perpetuate harmful tropes about Muslims make their deaths seem unimportant. Hilal reminds us that, in turn, “The dominant narrative becomes more difficult to dislodge from the imagination of a public who accepts this political landscape as matter of course.”

    The Government Is Spying on Muslims

    Innocent Until Proven Muslim is not limited to describing the pattern of physical abuse against Muslim bodies. Woven together with Hilal’s critical analysis of the human cost of post-9/11 wars are countless examples of sinister surveillance methods used to racially and religiously profile whole communities. Take for example, the creation of The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries over the age of 16 to register with the government. Although this program ended in 2011, 80,000 men were subject to intensive interrogations and not a single one was charged with a crime.

    Considering the superficial construction of the war on terror, Hilal reminds us that the government was able to “establish a differential system of justice,” paving the way for the normalization of entrapment, informants and so-called “fishing expeditions” — used to create conditions that lead to an actionable offense. The Holy Land Five case is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of arbitrary domestic trial cases.

    A charitable organization created to support displaced Palestinians across the Middle East, the Holy Land Five were accused of diverting donations to Hamas. Although no direct connection between them was found, all five men were sentenced to 15 to 65 years in prison, and many American Muslims are still grappling with the criminalization of Muslim charities.

    During the Obama administration, the authority of the U.S. government to surveil its citizens was expanded both in intent and practice — Hilal explains how these programs “disrupted community bonds” and “the confidence that stems from a reasonable expectation of freedom.” Mere months before the government launched the Countering Violent Extremism Program, Obama declared in his state of the union address that, “Muslims Americans are part of our American family.” A quick look at what this program entailed, however, was the pairing of vulnerable Muslim youth — disproportionately Black — with police officers who were trained to pathologize mental health issues. The psychological impact on Muslim Americans since 9/11 is insurmountable.

    To answer the question, “is the war on terror over?” Hilal closes with 11 interviews that feature Muslims from a variety of different backgrounds. The unmistakable message in these conversations is that collective liberation means justice for all and in that, abolishing oppressive institutions that continue to otherize Muslims. In the words of Zahra, a Somali chaplain whom Hilal quotes in the book:

    Islam has always been a theology and political tool that liberates people, even when they’re caged, even when they’re enslaved, even when they’re imprisoned. Even when our bodies are caged, even when we are under apartheid and in the borders of Gaza, or in the prisons in Philadelphia, or in the cages at Gitmo, Islam allows us to survive the unsurvivable. And that inherently makes you a threat to an empire whose only function has been to dominate, oppress, pillage, and kill.

    For many Muslims, it is difficult not to internalize and absorb anti-Muslim rhetoric in a climate that seeks to normalize it. Islamophobia in the U.S is baked into laws, institutions and policies. From being treated as a suspect community when going through airport security to global militarism that continues to yield unrestricted violence in countless Muslim-majority countries — imagining a better future requires rising up together. Zahra, along with the ten other interviewees, speak of the importance of unifying to dismantle anti-Muslim bigotry. Although individual Muslim communities face different degrees of state-sanctioned violence, collective liberation would ultimately free us all.

    The war on terror is and always will be rooted in racism. Although Trump was able to expand its executive reach, the pathway was paved by both Bush and Obama. What has differed across administrations is not the gravity of violence or the human toll, but the preference for one form of violence over another. It was Bush who created a xenophobic immigration system with the creation of ICE, it was Obama who earned his place in history as “deporter in chief,” and it was Trump who reigned terror with a series of executive orders banning Muslims from entering the country. There’s no singular definition of justice for Muslims in the U.S and abroad, but perhaps demanding accountability from the war criminals who’ve once occupied the oval office is a start.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Secret memo reveals 2002 meeting between Bush and Blair in lead up to Iraq War

    A secret memo published by Stop the War UK details an April 2002 meeting between Tony Blair and George W Bush concerning military intervention to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, reports Kerry Smith.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Britain: Protests planned to oppose Blair’s knighthood

    Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will receive a knighthood on June 13, but more than 1.2 million petitioners say he should be sent to The Hague as a war criminal, not honoured at Windsor Castle.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Some Guantánamo Prisoners Fear Transfer to US Prisons Due to Brutal Conditions

    Since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened in its “war on terror” iteration in 2002, there has been a tendency among liberal critics to hold it in stark relief to the “normal” civilian legal system. The cruelty and illegitimacy of Guantánamo Bay was contrasted against the inherent perceived legitimacy of U.S. courts and prisons. For as long as the detention center and the various tribunals have been around, it’s been common to hear arguments against them from human rights NGOs based on the efficacy and security of the civilian apparatus — the success rate of terrorism prosecutions, or the fact that no prisoner has ever escaped from a supermax prison.

    There is no question that U.S. interrogators carried out unspeakable torture at Guantánamo Bay, that officials held prisoners incommunicado and without having been convicted of a crime, and operated for years with almost no oversight or visibility from outside watchdog groups. However, all of those elements are present to one degree or another in the normal incarceration regime in the United States, a point police and prison abolitionists have been making for the duration of the war on terror.

    There has always been a fear that the abuses of Guantánamo Bay will migrate into the rest of the U.S. legal system. The reality is that many of them — including torture, indefinite pretrial detention and lack of oversight — have been there all along.

    Ongoing plea negotiations in the 9/11 trial at Guantánamo Bay underscore just how outdated the conventional paradigm is. The five defendants in the trial are now in talks with prosecutors to bring the capital punishment case to close, but, according to The New York Times, one of the key requirements from the defendants in the prior round of negotiations in 2017 was that they be able to serve their sentences at Guantánamo, “where they are able to eat and pray in groups.” They were reportedly adamant that they didn’t want to be sent to the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where, as the Times writes, “federal inmates are held in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day.” In the current round of negotiations, the Times reports that the five defendants want “guarantees that, even after their convictions, they would be able to eat and pray communally,” though they aren’t “pressing for a particular venue.” The ongoing fear that they could wind up back in extreme isolation, whether they’re held in military or civilian custody, reveals the baseline cruelty that permeates all U.S. prisons and detention facilities.

    For prison abolitionists, the news that the five defendants are concerned about how they would be treated if transferred to a stateside prison is not surprising at all. “Finding that prisoners would reject transfer to a U.S. federal prison in Colorado in favor of remaining where they are in Guantánamo isn’t shocking. While we understand how egregiously torturous conditions at Guantánamo are, all prisons are deadly,” Woods Ervin, media director at Critical Resistance, an international prison abolitionist organization, told Truthout in an emailed statement. “We shouldn’t imagine that other prisons are ‘more gentle,’ especially under conditions of solitary confinement. Prisoners often push to remain under conditions where they can maintain their communities, collective practices, and shared fights for their freedom. The issue here is about prisoners making a collective, self-determined choice over the conditions they’re surviving under.” The conditions at the Florence supermax are horrific, even by U.S. standards. Incarcerated people describe cells made entirely of concrete, including the bed, where prisoners are kept isolated for 23 hours a day. Recreational time is an hour in a small cage. People there go for weeks, if not longer, without seeing the sky, or a highway, or any reminder at all of the outside world. It’s not hard to understand why the 9/11 defendants would want to condition any negotiation on avoiding that kind of treatment, either in a federal prison or post-conviction at Guantanamo Bay.

    James Connell, an attorney for co-defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, confirmed the existence of the plea negotiations, which were first reported by The New York Times, in a statement posted to his defense team’s official Twitter account. “Negotiated agreements are part of all criminal cases, and negotiations have taken place throughout the case,” Connell said in the statement. “This process is not unusual: the vast majority of capital cases in the United States are resolved by plea.”

    Alka Pradhan, a human rights lawyer who also represents al-Baluchi, said that the negotiations “represent one path to ending military commissions, stopping indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay, and providing justice.” Military commissions are the novel legal apparatus in effect at Guantánamo Bay that combines military and civilian law. Connell and Pradhan declined to comment for this article.

    The 9/11 trial at Guantánamo Bay is arguably in its most precarious state since the current iteration of the case began in 2012, when the five co-defendants were arraigned before a military judge. That judge, Col. James Pohl, is long gone, having retired before the case could advance beyond pretrial motions. Three judges have succeeded him, and an additional candidate had to recuse himself after being assigned the case but before he could sit on the bench.

    The complications don’t stop there. The former chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, has also left the case, following clashes with the Biden administration about the applicability of international law at Guantánamo. Martins also served as the de facto chief spokesperson for the military commission system, which has been beleaguered by complications since Congress first created it in 2006, and updated in 2009. For nearly a decade, the defense and prosecution have argued about the rules of that system — from the mechanics of compelling witnesses to a remote military base on occupied, foreign soil, to the applicability of the Bill of Rights in the proceedings. The admissibility of evidence derived from torture has been central to the hearings, and remains unresolved.

    The COVID pandemic also essentially shut down the entire trial for 500 days.

    There are still 38 men held at Guantánamo Bay, 10 of whom have been charged in the military commissions system. Of the remaining prisoners, 19 have been cleared for transfer to a third-party country if security conditions are met. Seven have not been charged with a crime, but also aren’t cleared for transfer — this group is often referred to as “forever prisoners.” Two have been convicted, including Majid Khan, who also took a plea. Khan was tortured in the same CIA program as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the 9/11 “mastermind.” Last year, a military jury — known as a panel — urged leniency in sentencing Khan, who was the first victim of CIA torture to describe his treatment in a courtroom. The top sentencing official, known as the Convening Authority, approved a 10-year sentence and applied time served, meaning his term was finished on March 1 of this year. That doesn’t mean he’s free to go, however. The U.S. government reserves the right to continue to detain Guantánamo prisoners even after their time is served if a suitable third-party country hasn’t been identified. Khan’s lawyers are now calling for him to be transferred without delay.

    The response from the military panel to Khan’s treatment underlines the complications of bringing the 9/11 case to trial. Each of the defendants in that case was tortured by the CIA, including waterboarding, rape and sexual threats, and repeated physical and psychological abuse. Recently disclosed legal filings revealed that Ammar al-Baluchi was used as a training tool: His torture was “on-the-job practice” for other interrogators. If the Khan case is any indicator, that kind of treatment would heavily mitigate against a death penalty sentence, even in a case as notorious as the 9/11 trial.

    For as much reasonable worry as there is about Guantánamo Bay policies seeping into the civilian system, at least some of the torture enacted at Guantánamo in the early days of the war on terror was exported from U.S. prisons. Charles Graner, one of the few U.S. army soldiers held accountable for torture committed at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, “cut his teeth as first a guard / lieutenant at Pennsylvania’s max-security state prison, SCI-Greene,” Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, told Truthout in an emailed statement. “It was here that Graner routinely abused prisoners who were ‘in the hole’ (solitary confinement), just before he was activated for the reserves and sent to Iraq. I was on a unit (confined in solitary) with him [Graner].”

    “This is just one example of how the U.S.’s domestic torture within its solitary confinement units [is] exported as part of its so-called war on terror,” Saleem Holbrook added.

    Much of the abuse and torture the U.S. government has carried out in the wars it has waged since 2001 have been forgotten, ignored or justified. The image rehabilitation attempts of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others responsible for creating the torture and kidnapping programs are proof of that. But much of the abuse that happens inside prison walls is ignored as well, made deliberately invisible to perpetuate an unjust system of social control. The ongoing plea negotiations in the 9/11 case are the most recent example of how blurred the lines between these systems are, and that it’s never clear that the damaging influence only travels one way. Those seeking to find justice by closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay should also ask whether justice is possible so long as any prison exists in the United States.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Lasting Cruelties

    Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Don’t forget Iraq and Afghanistan

    It’s said the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. Shezana Hafiz from CAGE tells us why it’s critical to keep unpicking the West’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    By Pablo Navarrete

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • A New Cold War Won’t Help the People of Ukraine or Anyone Else

    Kyiv residents sit in tent set up after building is hit with shrapnel

    The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”

    “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”

    For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”

    Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”

    Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.

    But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.

    The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.

    Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.

    The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.

    Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.

    Unlike ordinary people around the world, foreign policy elites are not thinking primarily about the immediate needs of the Ukrainian people. If they were, the U.S. would be doing more to aid peace talks, cancel Ukraine’s onerous debt repayments to global banks and stop the denial of entry to Ukrainian refugees at the U.S. border.

    Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.

    Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.

    Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.

    To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.

    People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.

    For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”

    Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.

    More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.

    That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US military doctrine shifts to protect capitalism, threaten the world

    The US  military doctrine is about remaining the pre-eminent military power and ensuring that the world should be organised in a way that is most conducive to its security and prosperity. William Briggs looks at the shift since the failed ‘war on terror’.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Mainstream Media Denounce Civilian Killings — Unless the US Is Perpetrating Them

    A column of Russian military vehicles is seen near the village of Oktyabrsky, Belgorod Region, near the Russian-Ukrainian border, on February 26, 2022.

    Having worked inside mainstream U.S. media during the beginning of the “War on Terror” and run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the differences in today’s war coverage are dizzying to me.

    Civilians

    While covering Russia’s horrific aggression in Ukraine, there is a real focus — as there always should be — on civilian victims of war. Today, the focus on that essential aspect of the Russian invasion is prominent and continuous — from civilian deaths to the trauma felt by civilians as missiles strike nearby.

    Unfortunately, there was virtually no focus on civilian death and agony when it was the U.S. military launching the invasions. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on false pretenses — made possible by U.S. mainstream media complicity that I witnessed firsthand — civilian deaths were largely ignored and undercounted through the years.

    Shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, leaked directives from CNN’s management to its correspondents and anchors showed that the network was intent on playing down and rationalizing the killing and maiming of Afghan civilians by the U.S. military. One memo instructed CNN anchors that if they ever referenced Afghan civilian victims, they needed to quickly remind their audience that “these U.S. military actions are in response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the U.S.” Such language was mandatory, said the memo: “Even though it may start sounding rote, it is important that we make this point each time.”

    A few weeks after 9/11, what CNN viewer had forgotten it?

    Noting the cursory U.S. television coverage of Afghan civilian casualties, a New York Times reporter wrote: “In the United States, television images of Afghan bombing victims are fleeting, cushioned between anchors or American officials explaining that such sights are only one side of the story. In the rest of the world, however, images of wounded Afghan children curled in hospital beds or women rocking in despair over a baby’s corpse, beamed via satellite by the Qatar-based network, Al Jazeera, or CNN International, are more frequent and lingering.”

    The near-blackout on coverage of the civilian toll continued for decades. In April of last year, NBC anchor Lester Holt did a summing-up report on Afghanistan as “America’s longest war” by offering one and only one casualty figure: “2,300 American deaths.” There was no mention of the more than 70,000 Afghan civilian deaths since 2001, and no mention of a UN study that found that, in the first half of 2019, due mostly to aerial bombing, the U.S. and its allies killed more civilians than the Taliban and its allies.

    As the war on terror expanded to other countries, U.S. mainstream media remained largely uninterested in civilian victims of U.S. warfare and drone strikes.

    International Law

    Invasions and military force by one country against another are clearly illegal under international law, unless conducted in true self-defense (or authorized by the UN Security Council). In coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. mainstream media have correctly, repeatedly and without equivocation invoked international law and declared it illegal, as they did when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

    By contrast, when the U.S. illegally invaded or attacked country after country in recent decades, international law has almost never been invoked by mainstream U.S. media. That was surely the case in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion — unlike in Britain, where major media prominently discussed the reality that invading Iraq would be a crime against international law unless authorized by a Security Council resolution. On a BBC television special six weeks before the invasion, for example, Tony Blair was cross-examined on that point by antiwar citizens.

    In 1989, when the U.S. invaded Panama in perhaps the bloodiest drug bust in history, mainstream U.S. media made a concerted effort to ignore international law and its violation — as well as the slaughter of civilians.

    Imperialism

    Mainstream media in our country today are outraged by imperialism. Last Friday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell indignantly and repeatedly denounced “Russian imperialism.”

    As a lifelong opponent of imperialism, I’m also indignant that a powerful country like Russia is using force to try to impose its will and its own chosen leadership on the Ukrainian people. But I’ve never heard O’Donnell or anyone at MSNBC denounce U.S. imperialism. Indeed, the existence of something called “U.S. imperialism” is so adamantly denied by mainstream U.S. media that the phrase doesn’t appear in print without scare quotes.

    This stubborn unwillingness to recognize U.S. imperialism persists despite the fact that no other country (including Russia) has come close to ours in the last 70 years in imposing its will in changing the leadership of foreign governments, often from good to bad (for example, Iran in 1953; Guatemala in 1954; Congo in 1960; Chile, in 1973; Honduras in 2009). And that’s not to mention other U.S.-led regime changes (for example, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011).

    This denial persists despite the fact that the U.S. maintains 750 military bases in nearly 80 foreign countries (Russia has about 20 foreign bases, in half a dozen countries), that our military budget dwarfs that of every other country (it’s more than 12 times larger than Russia’s) and that the U.S. provides nearly 80% of the world’s weapons exports — including weapons sales and military training to 40 of the 50 most oppressive, anti-democratic governments on earth.

    Speaking of U.S. imperialism, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been all over the news in recent days commenting on Ukraine and accurately denouncing Putin as anti-democratic. But her commentary reeks of hypocrisy on many grounds, one of those being her key role, largely ignored by mainstream U.S. media, in enabling the violent military coup regime that replaced elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. (You can read about it here and here.)

    So as we rally to support Ukrainian civilians against great-power aggression from Russia, let’s do so with the understanding that imperialism should always be opposed, that all civilian victims of wars and violent coups are worthy, whether Iraqi or Honduran or Ukrainian, and that all criminals who violate international law should be held accountable, whether they’re based in Moscow or Washington.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Belmarsh Tribunal Is Demanding Justice For Victims Of The War On Terror

    The crimes of the War on Terror are an assault on justice and democracy across the planet. The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Vietnam War tribunals organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, is demanding accountability for those crimes.

    The post The Belmarsh Tribunal Is Demanding Justice For Victims Of The War On Terror appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Blasphemy: How Many Circles of Hell are there for the Elite?

    War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

    ― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

    See the source image

    There are thousands of examples daily in the mainstream and left-stream and right-stream media showing how broken and corrupt this system — capitalism — is.

    I’ll look, then, at the war machines, the ugly thieving corporations that suck the life out of our communities, that sag all community safety nets, that kill universal health care, universal dental care, universal housing.

    The military, and, yep, BlackRock, and all the other financial murderers tied together like a football stadium sized tape worm sucking dry humanity. War and AI and Money and Fourth Industrial Revolution and Billionaires all spooled together like a heaping globe of nematodes.

    Nematodes found to positively influence dung beetle larval microbiomes

    Anything and everything associated with the military is, well, right smack in all the circles and levels of “hell” — and you might look at your investments, you might look at your cousin’s kids employed by one of a thousand military-machinery factories or services. The military connection to everything is what this Empire has now accomplished. Even the forest service has assault rifles, bombs and armored vehicles. A thought experiment, below, Dante, hell, all of that Christianity, and from me, atheist deluxe!

    Illustration to the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Abyss of Hell), 1480-1490

    Here are the circles of hell in order of entrance and severity:

    1. Limbo: Where those who never knew Christ exist. Dante encounters ​Ovid, Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and more here.
    2. Lust: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters Achilles, Paris, Tristan, Cleopatra, and Dido, among others.
    3. Gluttony: Where those who overindulge exist. Dante encounters ordinary people here, not characters from epic poems or gods from mythology. The author Boccaccio took one of these characters, Ciacco, and incorporated him into his 14th-century collection of tales called The Decameron.
    4. Greed: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters more ordinary people but also the guardian of the circle, Pluto, the mythological king of the Underworld. This circle is reserved for people who hoarded or squandered their money, but Dante and Virgil do not directly interact with any of its inhabitants. This is the first time they pass through a circle without speaking to anyone, a commentary on Dante’s opinion of greed as a higher sin.
    5. Anger: Dante and Virgil are threatened by the Furies when they try to enter through the walls of Dis (Satan). This is a further progression in Dante’s evaluation of the nature of sin; he also begins to question himself and his own life, realizing his actions and nature could lead him to this permanent torture.
    6. Heresy: Rejection of religious and/or political “norms.” Dante encounters Farinata degli Uberti, a military leader and aristocrat who tried to win the Italian throne and was convicted posthumously of heresy in 1283. Dante also meets Epicurus, Pope Anastasius II, and Emperor Frederick II.
    7. Violence: This is the first circle to be further segmented into sub-circles or rings. There are three of them—the Outer, Middle, and Inner rings—housing different types of violent criminals. The first are those who were violent against people and property, such as Attila the Hun. Centaurs guard this Outer Ring and shoot its inhabitants with arrows. The Middle Ring consists of those who commit violence against themselves (suicide). These sinners are perpetually eaten by Harpies. The Inner Ring is made up of the blasphemers, or those who are violent against God and nature. One of these sinners is Brunetto Latini, a sodomite, who was Dante’s own mentor. (Dante speaks kindly to him.) The usurers are also here, as are those who blasphemed not just against God but also the gods, such as Capaneus, who blasphemed against Zeus.
    8. Fraud: This circle is distinguished from its predecessors by being made up of those who consciously and willingly commit fraud. Within the eighth circle is another called the Malebolge (“Evil Pockets”), which houses 10 separate bolgias (“ditches”). In these exist types of those who commit fraud: panderers/seducers; flatterers; simoniacs (those who sell ecclesiastical preferment); sorcerers/astrologers/false prophets; barrators (corrupt politicians); hypocrites; thieves; false counselors/advisers; schismatics (those who separate religions to form new ones); and alchemists/counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators, etc. Each bolgia is guarded by different demons, and the inhabitants suffer different punishments, such as the simoniacs, who stand head-first in stone bowls and endure flames upon their feet.
    9. Treachery: The deepest circle of Hell, where Satan resides. As with the last two circles, this one is further divided, into four rounds. The first is Caina, named after the biblical Cain, who murdered his brother. This round is for traitors to family. The second, Antenora—from Antenor of Troy, who betrayed the Greeks—is reserved for political/national traitors. The third is Ptolomaea for Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who is known for inviting Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to dinner and then murdering them. This round is for hosts who betray their guests; they are punished more harshly because of the belief that having guests means entering into a voluntary relationship, and betraying a relationship willingly entered is more despicable than betraying a relationship born into. The fourth round is Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. This round is reserved for traitors to their lords/benefactors/masters. As in the previous circle, the subdivisions each have their own demons and punishments.

    Here we go, though, daily, the sickness of this country, Biden, Trump, the entire capitalist shithole. You kind reader could give this short piece your own multiple examples of the militarization of everything. You think the Internet of Things, the Internet of Nano Things, the Internet of Bodies isn’t tied to military and surveillence capitalism? Then you are living in a bowl of Jello. Face down!

    “The price we pay for militarism — The United States’ massive military spending means less money for everything else” (Street Roots)

     

    US Army DARPA 2 640

    And, so, this is news, that never ever gets criticized by mainstream media, by the thugs in the Press, by all of the pukes that are Americans. War, toys, billions of taxpayer money for this shit. This is just ONE of a million tools of war, tools of subjugation, tools of chaos the Western Powers produce with their people’s taxes:

    OPV – the future? Sikorsky and DARPA think so

    What does OPV stand for? Optionally-Piloted Vehicle. Sikorsky and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have been working on a remotely controlled Sikorsky Black Hawk, aptly registered N60-0PV (former UH-60A 79-23298 of the US Army, with msn 70115).

    Together with Lockheed Martin they used DARPA’s ALIAS (Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System) programme for a test flight, which took place at Fort Campbell AAF (KY), on 5 February.

    Sitting on the runway, one of Sikorsky’s pilots flips the optionally piloted cockpit switch from two to zero, exits the aircraft and walks across the runway.

    Not long after, on a clear cold morning, the Black Hawk, with DARPA’s logo, completes a pre-flight check list, starts its engines, spins up its rotors and takes off with no crew onboard. The test flight will take thirty minutes to complete.

    Then, of course, the USA and decades of bioweapons, poison weapons, toxins, sound blasts, plasma guns, chemicals, drugs, synergistic weapons, and mass propaganda/false flags, torture vis-a-vis the PhD’s of the APA (American Psychological Association), etc. How many soldiers have I talked to over the years — my students — who were forced to take anti-malarial drugs, vaccinations for sand fleas, anthrax, Gulf War Syndrome, etc.? How many experiments do we have in this society on military and civilians? This is the reality of the freak show of USA.

    The U.S.’s chemical and biological weapons programs were outgrowths of a Cold War mentality that pursued hegemony at all costs. This was in keeping with the history of the United States as a capitalist society founded upon slavery, exploitation and, war. While these programs were supposedly phased out decades ago, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised new questions about the character of biological and chemical warfare. Claims of a “lab leak” theory that suggest China leaked COVID-19 from its Wuhan Institute of Virology have been thoroughly debunked  and met with concerns about the continued operation of Fort Detrick in Maryland, the epicenter of the U.S.’s biological weapons program. Fort Detrick has been linked to the experimentation of pathogens such as Ebola and Anthrax. (Black Agenda Report)

    Eight times the United States Has Used Biological and Chemical Weapons Since WWII

    Then of course, the war lords, the felons, the liars, the polilticians, the media, the entire left-right pukes cruising to have a war with Russia? Now, let’s see, which country murdered millions? Which Germany murdered boys and men in Greece and destroyed villages? Hmm, Germany? That one, or the DNA in the Germans? And what did Cuba do to USA, how many invasions, how many countries did Cuba use to set up murder incorporated?

    Greece raises World War II reparations issue, Germany unimpressed – EURACTIV.com

    [The Kalavryta massacre (Greek: Σφαγή των Καλαβρύτων), or the Holocaust of Kalavryta (Ολοκαύτωμα των Καλαβρύτων), refers to the near-extermination of the male population and the total destruction of the town of Kalavryta, Axis-occupied Greece, by the 117th Jäger Division (Wehrmacht) during World War II, on 13 December 1943.]

    “Do You Want a War Between Russia and NATO?”

    After a strenuous six hours of discussions Putin, predictably, monopolized the eminently quotable department, starting with one that will be reverberating all across the Global South for a long time: “Citizens of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia have seen how peaceful is NATO.”

    There’s more. The already iconic  Do you want a war between Russia and NATO? – followed by the ominous  “there will be no winners”. Or take this one, on Maidan: “Since February 2014, Russia has considered a coup d’état to be the source of power in Ukraine. This is a bad sandbox, we don’t like this kind of game.”

    On the Minsk agreements, the message was blunt: “The President of Ukraine has said that he does not like any of the clauses of the Minsk agreements. Like it, or not – be patient, my beauty. They must be fulfilled.” (Pepe Escobar)

    The entire premise of war lords, the USA, the UK, the EU, NATO, well, this is it — lies, drums of war, movies, fake headlines, rotten state department, Administration, DoD, Deep State, all of them from east coast private colleges running the USA into war machinery, war fomenting:

    Here, Oliver Stone, on Robert Scheer’s podcast —

     I can guarantee you that Mr. Putin is not at all interested in nationalism. He doesn’t see nationalism the way you’re seeing it. He sees national interests for Russia. And those interests are in the sphere of that area around Russia, which is  violated constantly by air exercises and land exercises, gigantic operations in the north and in the Black Sea, of Western allies, to warn Russia not to invade. The word “invasion”—it’s unbelievable, in my lifetime I remember Vietnam and I remember the New York Times writing about how dangerous Vietnam was because of the communists. But I’ve never seen the word “invasion” every day in the New York Times. Russian aggression, invasion—they did it like an Orwellian propaganda word, and they use it over and over, so that if there comes to be a fight, you will automatically register “Russian invasion.” That will be the first reaction, rather than “Ukrainian invasion of Donbass.” It’s a very sick game . . . it’s called the great game. It’s what these people do for a living; they play the great game. They raise the strategic tension wherever they can, the pot boils, and they take advantage of it.

    For some of us, this is another inflection point on why the USA needs to go the way of the dodo: Harrowing Drone-Strike Testimony at US Senate/ February 10, 2022/

     ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi came under fire from Sen. Lindsey Graham, while the chair of a Yemeni group offered graphic testimony of airstrikes’ human costs.

    The first to do so was Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, who said that former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama “started using drones strikes in Yemen without Congress or the American public ever even having a conversation about it.”

    “Successive presidents have unilaterally claimed the power to use secretive war-based rules to kill terrorism suspects in multiple other countries around the world where we were not, or are not, at war,” Shamsi continued. “Despite widespread, credible reports of terrible civilian deaths and injuries, and lacking any strategic assessment of costs and consequences, or an end goal, the executive branch has kept expanding this program geographically, and in the categories of groups and people who could be killed based only on a president’s say-so.”

    “The legal justifications are vague and ever-shifting, and virtually no other country agrees with them,” she added. “If any other country launched this program, we would rightly call it an unlawful, extrajudicial, and arbitrary use of force. Yet it is a core component of what Americans now call our forever or endless wars.” (Consortium News)

    How many levels or circles of that Hell are we now constructing for the special and beautiful people — marketers, scam artists, the liars club, elite, the Eichmann’s in skinny jeans and hip skirts?

    This is it, the lords of finance are the lords of war are the lords of AI are the lords of transhumanism are the lords of digital dungeons for us common folk.

    Enough already. Enjoy your weekend, Big Mac’s and all.

    See the source image
    The post Blasphemy: How Many Circles of Hell are there for the Elite? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Bombed Syria Dam on ‘No-Strike List,’ Risked Killing Thousands of Civilians

    Tabqa dam

    Syria’s largest dam was supposed to be off-limits during the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State, but nearly five years ago, the Pentagon bombed it anyway, jeopardizing tens of thousands of civilians’ lives, the New York Times reported Thursday.

    The Tabqa Dam is a massive, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that holds back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley home to hundreds of thousands of people. It was also “a strategic linchpin” controlled by the Islamic State, the newspaper noted.

    On March 26, 2017, a series of explosions battered the dam, knocking workers to the ground and sparking a power outage, fire, and equipment failures. As the reservoir began to rise, local authorities urged people living downstream to flee. The entire dam could have failed, experts say, had one of the bombs not been a dud.

    Following the attack, Dave Philipps, Azmat Khan, and Eric Schmitt reported for the Times:

    The Islamic State, the Syrian government, and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”

    “The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.

    In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.

    The revelation of Task Force 9’s role in the assault on the Tabqa Dam follows a pattern described in previous Times’ investigations. As the newspaper noted on Thursday, “The unit routinely circumvented the rigorous airstrike approval process and hit Islamic State targets in Syria in a way that repeatedly put civilians at risk.”

    Phillips, Khan, and Schmitt reported:

    In response to questions from theTimes, U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, acknowledged dropping three 2,000-pound bombs, but denied targeting the dam or sidestepping procedures. A spokesman said that the bombs hit only the towers attached to the dam, not the dam itself, and while top leaders had not been notified beforehand, limited strikes on the towers had been preapproved by the command.

    “Analysis had confirmed that strikes on the towers attached to the dam were not considered likely to cause structural damage to the Tabqa Dam itself,” Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. Noting that the dam did not collapse, he added, “That analysis has proved accurate.”

    However, Syrian witnesses interviewed by the Times, and two former U.S. officials who were directly involved in the air war at the time, said the situation was far graver than the Pentagon let on.

    According to the newspaper:

    Critical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely. The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam, which engineers said would have been catastrophic. The situation grew so desperate that authorities at dams upstream in Turkey cut water flow into Syria to buy time, and sworn enemies in the yearslong conflict—the Islamic State, the Syrian government, Syrian Defense Forces, and the United States—called a rare emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster.

    Engineers who worked at the dam, who did not want to be identified because they feared reprisal, said it was only through quick work, much of it made at gunpoint as opposing forces looked on, that the dam and the people living downstream of it were saved.

    “The destruction would have been unimaginable,” said a former director at the dam. “The number of casualties would have exceeded the number of Syrians who have died throughout the war.”

    At least 95,000 civilians have died in Syria as a direct result of the ongoing conflict, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

    Journalist Ben Norton argued that “the U.S. military intentionally bombed a dam in Syria that was on its ‘no-strike list’ of protected civilian sites, because it knew it could kill tens of thousands.”

    Debunking Pentagon officials’ claims that they target militants with precision, a report released in September by Airwars — a military watchdog that monitors and seeks to reduce civilian harm in violent conflict zones — found that airstrikes conducted by the U.S. killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians during the first two decades of the so-called “War on Terror” pursued in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were home to 97% of those casualties.

    Meanwhile, “no disciplinary action was taken against” Task Force 9, the Times reported Thursday. “The secret unit continued to strike targets using the same types of self-defense justifications it had used on the dam.”

    “While the dam was still being repaired, the task force sent a drone over the community next to the dam,” wrote Phillips, Khan, and Schmitt. “As the drone circled, three of the civilian workers who had rushed to save the dam finished their work and piled into a small van and headed back toward their homes.”

    “More than a mile away from the dam, the van was hit by a coalition airstrike,” they added. “A mechanical engineer, a technician, and a Syrian Red Crescent worker were killed.”

    Although Airwars reported these civilian deaths when they occurred in 2017, they have never been officially acknowledged by the U.S. military.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Guantanamo: US condemned for human rights abuses on Cuban soil

    According to a new UN Human Rights Council report, the worst human rights violations on Cuban soil take place at the hands of United States agents at the US Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba’s easternmost province, reports Ian Ellis-Jones.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Enduring stain: Guantánamo military prison turns 20

    The first prisoners of the “War on Terror” — declared by US president George W Bush — began arriving at Camp X-Ray prison at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, writes Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Even After Release, Guantánamo Survivors Live Under Surveillance and in Anguish

    A protester holds a placard reading "Close Guantanamo" and portrait of detainee during an outdoor demonstration.

    It is a sad fact that it requires a major anniversary, two decades on from the arrival of the first prisoners in hoods and orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray prison, for the media and the U.S. public to pay attention to Guantánamo and the 39 men who remain imprisoned there.

    The 741 men who have been released have been almost entirely forgotten by the public. The truth is that the U.S. has largely washed its hands of those it tortured and imprisoned without charge or trial for years on end, outsourcing its responsibility to support the reentry of these men to other countries, usually in the Global South, in some cases with fatal consequences.

    I work for the only project in the world that is solely dedicated to assisting people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo to rebuild their lives — a project run by the human rights charity Reprieve. Many of the men we’ve assisted have been dropped by the U.S. into a country they’ve never been to before, where they have no contacts or networks and possibly don’t even speak the language.

    Our research shows that almost one in three detainees who have been resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status documents. And even those who are granted residency find that rather than receive the support they need, they are stigmatized and kept under surveillance.

    Often, host countries don’t allow the family of the former detainee to join him or even visit, after families have already been kept apart for so long. In one of the most heart-breaking cases I’ve worked on, the host country refused visit requests from the former detainee’s mother for five years, and by the time they finally acquiesced, she had died, having not seen her son for more than 20 years.

    Deprived of citizenship or residency rights, people who were previously imprisoned in Guantánamo cannot get a job, access health care (including psychological support), education and other vital services. They may not be able to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and if living in a country with checkpoints, can’t pass through them. Without this most basic passport to participation in society, they are effectively confined to the shadows.

    The program that I work for, called “Life After Guantánamo,” tries to help survivors of Guantánamo living in these dire circumstances. Founded by Reprieve in 2009, the program has helped 130 men living in 29 countries.

    Reprieve has legally represented more than 80 Guantánamo detainees and helped more people secure release from the prison than any other organization. Through the Life After Guantánamo program, we request that governments give people who were formerly held in the prison the tools needed to rebuild their lives, or, failing that, we seek to do so ourselves. With support, many detainees, whether repatriated to their home countries or resettled in host countries, have been able to start that process.

    Yet even detainees with those comparative “success stories” continue to be haunted by the time they spent in U.S. custody. “It feels like I am still there, I just changed for the big Guantánamo,” one former prisoner told me. “When I close my eyes I am back in Guantánamo, so I can’t sleep,” confided another.

    I visited one detainee after he’d been resettled who wouldn’t leave his new apartment. Although physically he was a free man, mentally he was still imprisoned. Detained in Guantánamo for 15 years since he was only 18 years old, he had become so institutionalized that he couldn’t cope with freedom. With support, he’s now learned the language of his new home country, formed friendships and is undergoing vocational training.

    Many aren’t given that chance. In some cases, men are released from Guantánamo only to be immediately imprisoned again. Twenty-three men were transferred to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), expecting to live as free men, but were detained upon their arrival in horrific conditions when the UAE reneged on assurances given to the U.S. Most of them have been forcibly repatriated to Yemen, despite concerns about their safety. One man, Ravil Mingazov, could be repatriated to Russia where he faces persecution and, as confirmed by the United Nations, a “substantial risk of torture.”

    When Senegal deported two former detainees to Libya, they immediately disappeared into militia-run prisons. Although they have since been found and released, they are at risk of being detained again. Former detainees resettled in Kazakhstan and Mauritania died of medical problems because they could not access health care as they had not been afforded basic rights.

    Most resettlements were negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency, and once Donald Trump took over, the U.S. appeared to completely disengage from what was happening to them once resettled, giving host countries license to mistreat and abuse them.

    President Joe Biden can end the lottery that determines whether people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo are given any chance at life. He can ensure that resettlements and repatriations are done safely, without former detainees being put at risk of imprisonment or persecution, that they are afforded citizenship or rights as residents and that their loved ones are able to join them. These demands should be central to the campaign to close Guantánamo, because Guantánamo can continue to imprison, and even kill, after men escape its four walls.

    Disgracefully, the U.S. offers no compensation to these men for the unspeakable horrors they suffered in U.S. custody. The very least the Biden administration can do is ensure that once released from Guantánamo, former prisoners are actually given the opportunity to know freedom.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Enduring Stain: The Guantánamo Military Prison Turns Twenty

    Anniversaries for detention centres, concentration camps and torture facilities are not the relishable calendar events in the canon of human worth.  But not remembering them, when they were used, and how they continue being used, would be unpardonable amnesia.

    On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners of the absurdly named “War on Terror”, declared with such confused understanding by US President George W. Bush, began arriving at the newly constructed Camp X-Ray prison at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay.  Structurally crude, it was intended as a temporary facility, remote and out of sight.  Instead, it became a permanent and singular contribution of US political and legal practice, withering due process and civil liberties along the way.

    After two decades, 779 prisoners have spent time there, many of whom were low level operatives of minimal importance.  Prior to being sent to the camp, the detainees endured abductions, disappearances, and torture in US-operated centres in allied countries.  The previous director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Aspel, had more than a nodding acquaintance with this process, having overseen operations at a black site in Thailand specialising in interrogating al-Qaeda suspects.

    Guantánamo Bay was a mad, cruel experiment about how legal limbos and forged purgatories of the law can function to dehumanise and degrade.  It was developed by people supposedly versed in a liberal legal tradition but keen to make exceptions in battling a supposedly novel enemy.  The detainees were deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” – as if there was such a thing – thereby placing them outside the formal protections of humanitarian law.  They were subjected to sleep deprivation, forced feeding, lengthy detainment, beatings, stress positions and an assortment of other torture methods.

    In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney sneered at suggestions that the inmates were being mistreated.  “They’re living in the tropics.  They’re well fed.  They’ve got everything they could possibly want.  There wasn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people.”

    The closure of the facility has been constantly urged with minimal return.  It was one of the electoral messages of the presidential campaign in 2007.  Barack Obama and his rival, Hillary Clinton, endorsed the idea.  As did the Republican contender for the White House, John McCain.  As Obama declared at the time, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values.”

    A joint US-European Union statement from June 15, 2009 noted, with welcome, the decision by President Obama to affect a closure by January 22 the following year.  But it also acknowledged what has been a persistent problem: returning detainees to their countries of origin or a third country that might be willing to accept them.

    In the dying days of the Obama administration, the facility, despite a reduction in the inmate population, remained functional.  Congress proved recalcitrant and obstructive on the issue but there was also opposition to the closure from various arms of government, including the Pentagon.  Lee Wolosky, formerly Obama’s Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, could only marvel darkly at this seemingly indestructible piece of legal infrastructure.  “In large part,” he wrote, this mess had been “self-inflicted – a result of our own decisions to engage in torture, hold detainees indefinitely without charge, set up dysfunctional military commissions and attempt to avoid oversight by the federal courts.”

    In 2016, Donald Trump, the eventual victor of that year’s presidential contest, repeatedly insisted that he would “load it with some bad dudes”.  In 2018, he signed a new executive order keeping the military prison open, reiterating the line that terrorists were not merely “criminals” but “unlawful enemy combatants”.  Releasing any such individuals from Guantánamo had been, he observed gravely, a mistake.  “In the past, we have foolishly released hundred and hundreds of dangerous terrorists only to meet them again on the battlefield, including the ISIS leader, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, who we captured, who we had, who we released.”

    On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the camp’s opening, Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, was yet another voice to urge its closure.  “President Joe Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, has promised to close it, but so far has failed to do so.”  She insisted that each detainee’s case be resolved, be it through transfer and release, or via “a regularly constituted federal court without recourse to the death penalty.”

    Despite being an enduring blot on the country’s credibility, the facility remains ingloriously open, a reminder that there are legal provinces where the US is willing to detain people indefinitely, without trial or scrutiny.  Thirty-nine men remain, thirteen of whom are in indefinite detention.  This is despite the latter having had their transfers out of the facility approved a decade ago.  The calls for the military prison’s closure reach occasional crescendos, but these eventually diminish before the machinery of stifling bureaucracy.  Tragically, there is every risk that the Guantánamo experiment will be replicated rather than abolished.  Such creations, once brought into being, can prove deathless.

    The post Enduring Stain: The Guantánamo Military Prison Turns Twenty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • President Biden Must Find The Political Will To Close Guantanamo Bay

    It is, to be blunt, beyond dispiriting to have to be calling for the closure of the tired and discredited “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay 20 years — 7,306 days — since it first opened.

    The prison, as I have long explained, is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every day that it remains open ought to be a source of shame to anyone with any respect for the law — or, for that matter, with any common decency.

    In countries that respect the rule of law, the only way to be stripped of your liberty is as a criminal suspect or as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions. At Guantánamo, the Bush administration threw away the rulebook, holding men without any rights whatsoever as “enemy combatants”, who could be held indefinitely, with no requirement that they ever face charges, and with no legal mechanism in place to ever ensure their release.

    The post President Biden Must Find The Political Will To Close Guantanamo Bay appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Islamophobia in the Labour Party

    It’s no surprise that Keir Starmer neglected to mention Islamophobia in the Labour Party, it’s an issue that’s been ignored for far too long. 

    Video transcript

    Islamophobia in the Labour Party has been deeply entrenched for years. It didn’t start under Keir Starmer and it unfortunately wasn’t cured under Jeremy Corbyn.

    The Labour Party has been actually responsible for promulgating Islamophobia in the UK, I think really at a mainstream level ever since the beginning of the so-called war on terror under Tony Blair and New Labour. 

    We have to act within the terms set out in resolution 1441. That is our legal base. But it is the reason why I say frankly that if we do act, we should do so with a clear conscience and a strong heart.  

    And of course, in order to justify that war Muslims were demonised, and US State Department talking points were proliferated across the UK. We had the securitisation of Muslim communities, the othering, the demonisation of Muslims as terrorists, as people who want to oppress women, who hate gay people, all that kind of thing. 

    So these are sort of narratives that the Labour Party has historically over the last sort of 20 years been responsible for. Under Jeremy Corbyn, unfortunately, it wasn’t cured. We had a sort of different change of position in that we had an anti-imperialist leader of the Labour Party, and in Jeremy Corbyn we had someone who made it very clear that he personally was opposed to Islamophobia. But we didn’t have the expulsion of the Henry Jackson society from the parliamentary Labour Party, which is a right-wing, Neo-conservative Islamophobic group. We still have many Labour MPs who are a member of that group. We didn’t have tackling of these narratives around grooming gangs and Muslims sort of being out to sexually abuse white women. So we didn’t have any of these sort of things being tackled under Jeremy Corbyn unfortunately.

    And now we’re in a position with Keir Starmer, where we’ve had a sort of an extreme pivot back to the days of New Labour. And actually, I think it’s probably even worse than that now, because he’s been indulging narratives around so-called Muslim antisemitism, and has been allying himself with a very extreme Zionist, right-wing, pro-Israel groups who are also, of course, dedicated to demonising Muslims, because it’s also in their interest. And it’s in the state of Israel’s interest to promote the idea that Palestinians are terrorists, and that they want to create a sort of a radical Islamic State. 

    OK, and I believe that we are live now so thank you very much everyone and welcome. 

    Of course, we had a report in November 2020 from the Labour Muslim network, who conducted the largest survey of Muslim political opinion in the Labour Party that has ever been conducted in history. And they found in that survey that one in four Muslims in the Labour Party have directly experienced Islamophobia, that one in three Muslims in Labour party have witnessed Islamophobia, and that almost half of Muslims in the Labour Party didn’t trust the Labour Party’s complaints procedures, nor do they think that the Labour Party actually takes Islamophobia seriously. 

    And I think that was really vindicated when Keir Starmer refused to even acknowledge that report existed until two weeks after it was released. This was a bombshell report from a major Muslim group inside the Labour Party documenting some very serious things about Islamophobia. And Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the party, didn’t even acknowledge it until two weeks later. So I don’t think Islamophobia is taken seriously in the Labour Party. And I think it has a very long history in the party.

    I think there is a hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s worth describing as a hierarchy. We have a situation in which any accusation of antisemitism, whether it’s made in good faith or not, and most of these accusations are not made in good faith. They are designed to smear and target not only Muslim political activists, but Jewish, anti-Zionist, and other people who support the Palestinian Liberation cause. That’s a very cynical operation going on, and just to basically defend the State of Israel. It has nothing to do really with tackling Judeophobia, anti-Jewish prejudice. And then, on the other hand, we have Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, many other prejudices and bigotries that exists inside the Labour Party (I think Islamophobia is one of the foremost of those) not being tackled at all. Not being given any sort of seriousness. So I wouldn’t describe it as a hierarchy, I would just describe it as essentially racism isn’t taken seriously in the Labour Party. There aren’t procedures, really there, that deal with them. I don’t think the staff of the Labour Party who deal with complaints are really concerned about Islamophobia. And I think it goes right to the top. I think that the Labour Party manages to sort of coast on the idea that it’s an anti-racist party that historically has been anti-racist. Historically, it’s been a party that supported imperialism, supported colonialism, that hasn’t really been all that progressive on race issues. 

    And I think people are waking up to the fact, particularly those from Muslim and other ethnic minority backgrounds, that the Labour Party is not on their side, and that it’s not a party that’s dedicated to anti-racism.

    The Muslim vote accounts for a very large percentage of the Labour Party’s vote in many marginal seats. And I think that the Labour Party doesn’t really value Muslim votes; it does take them for granted. And I think that was demonstrated in the Batley & Spen by-election. Of course, Labour managed to just slip over the line there. But I mean, in a general election setting, we’re talking about, you know, 10s of seats potentially, in which Muslims will effectively decide the fate of that seat. 

    And I think that if the Labour Party doesn’t begin to take Islamophobia seriously and carries on not just not taking Islamophobia seriously, but actually showing active contempt towards Muslims. If it carries on in that way, then I think that it’s very, very likely that the Labour Party will end up losing many seats in the next general election on account of Muslims deciding that either they’re going to stay home, or they’re just going to vote for another party, that’s not the Labour Party.

    Please support The Canary. It’s really important that we challenge mainstream media narratives and that we support our own independent media because we’re not going to get a fair hearing in the mainstream media. We need to support our own independent media.

    By Pablo Navarrete

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • If Biden Doesn’t Act on AUMF, the US’s Blank Check for War Continues

    President Joe Biden walks out of the podium after speaking during International Women's Day in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 8, 2021. Behind Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Air Force General Jacqueline Van Ovost greet each other with an elbow-bump.

    It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.

    Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

    Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.

    “I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.

    In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, airstrikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in 22 countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the U.S. State Department, more than doubled.

    Under that AUMF, U.S. troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”

    For nearly a year, the Biden administration has conducted a comprehensive evaluation of this country’s counterterrorism policies, while continuing to carry out airstrikes in at least four countries. The 2001 AUMF has, however, already been invoked by Biden to cover an unknown number of military missions in 12 countries: Afghanistan, Cuba, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.

    “A lot is being said about the Biden administration’s rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy, and while it’s true that Biden has conducted substantially less drone strikes so far than his predecessors, which is a positive step,” Savell told TomDispatch, “his invocation of the 2001 AUMF in at least 12 countries indicates that the U.S. will continue its counterterrorism activities in many places. Basically, the U.S. post-9/11 wars continue, even though U.S. troops have formally left Afghanistan.”

    AUMFing in Africa

    “[W]e are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billion emergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”

    If you want to buy a house, a 20% down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1% was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.

    “This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to one million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.

    Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in 13 countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.

    In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed U.S. troops in Niger — one of the 13 AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, U.S. Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.

    Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (section 127e of title 10 of the U.S. Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.

    The U.S. military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, codenamed Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Trump and Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of 13 African nations where U.S. troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.

    In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where U.S. troops saw combat.

    American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged U.S. troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a U.S. military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”

    In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war-on-terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.

    In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the U.S. military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then-Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.

    Between March and October of 2011, in fact, U.S. drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.

    The War for Terror?

    In the wake of 9/11, 90% of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.

    As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”

    While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the U.S. military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”

    In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around 90 troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”

    In Africa, Biden noted, U.S. forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, U.S. troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.

    Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than 20 years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report, itself, was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.

    The State Department had counted 32 foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around six trillion dollars, and nearly one million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at 69.

    With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after 20 years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in 22 countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.

    “The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”

    When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.

    As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.